Creating Homebrew Package For StaticSiteGenerator Distribution

In a previous post playing with GitHub Actions I thought it might be interseting to figure out how to distribute the binary via Homebrew.

While reading through the Acceptable Formulae documentation, my dreams of being accepted into the Homebrew-core packages were dashed. (end sarcasm)

The primary rule that would be broken by this software are:

Niche (or self-submitted) stuff

Namely:

be maintained (i.e. the last release wasn’t ages ago, it works without patching on all Homebrew-supported OS versions and has no outstanding, unpatched security vulnerabilities)

The software has had an update in the past few weeks (at time of this writing), however previous to that was 4 years ago. Not exactly actively maintained.

be known

Nobody knows this software exists except for myself

be used

As far as I know, I’m the only user of it

have a homepage

… not yet, however perhaps a quick github self hosted page that’s essentially the readme file.

The next question to answer is how can I self host this formula? Seeing as I highly doubt Homebrew would accept my PR (and for good reason. Please continue your processes).

In Homebrew parlance, what I want to create is a tap. By default this relies on GitHub, which is perfect for this series of events.

I’m going to partially re-hash the official Homebrew documentation here for my own convenience:

1. Create a github repo /mrnickel/homebrew-mrnickel This is the convention that Homebrew uses in order to tap properly.
2. Create the Go formula using: brew create https://github.com/mrnickel/StaticSiteGenerator/archive/refs/tags/{RELEASE_VERSION_HERE}.tar.gz --go This will create a formula definition file that will be committed to the mrnickel/homebrew-mrnickel repo.
3. Edit the information as appropriate in the definition. Setting the desc, homepage, url
4. Copy the file from $(brew --repository)/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula directory, to the homebrew-mrnickel git directory.
5. Commit and push to the mrnickel/homebrew-mrnickel repository
6. Run brew tap mrnickel/mrnickel
7. Run brew install StaticSiteGenerator

Conclusion

After some trial and error I came up with a suitable homebrew formula.

I’ve used Homebrew for many many years now. I’ve never fully understood how it works, just that it works. It was interesting to dive into it a bit deeper. They’ve done an excellent job with their documentation, and it’s a well thought out package manager. I suppose that’s why it’s essentially the default package manager for MacOS.

I spent far too much time googling for ways to create the formula file, and I should have instead have just relied on the brew help and brew create help documentation as it’s well represented. If only more software took as much pride in their docs as Homebrew does.

One thing I wish they would add would be a way to specify the path of the generated .rb file.

Now that I’ve set up this homebrew tap, I can add this to some machine provisioning scripts I’ve been meaning to write. Perhaps an article for another day. That along with some dotfiles that I should persist.